Art Libraries Society of
Roosevelt Hotel
This session was generously sponsored by Prestel Publishing
Speakers:
Robert Shibley, Professor, University
at
Emily Axelrod, Director, Rudy Bruner
Foundation
Lily Yeh, Founder,
Robert Belstein, Executive
Director,
Recorder: Dorothy
Tao, University at
Carole Ann Fabian introduced the session, stating that the
Rudy Bruner Foundation Awards for Urban Excellence http://www.brunerfoundation.org/p/rba.html
seek to encourage and recognize innovative thinking and excellence in urban
design achieved through community collaboration. She described the development of Rudy Bruner
Foundation Award Digital Archive (RBADA), which aims to provide a useful urban
design resource for architecture students and practitioners as they study
precedents in their work. Locating full case sets that document urban design is
difficult, but by providing interactive full text Web access to Rudy Bruner award-winning
portfolios, the Digital Archive aims to remedy this problem. Carole Ann
reviewed the capabilities of the Archive website, which will provide full-text
searching by project, location, and participants, and is scheduled to go live
in May 2004. With each new Bruner Competition, the winning portfolios will be
indexed, scanned, and added to the Archive.
Emily Axelrod explained that the
Bruner Awards celebrate urban projects that make contributions to the social
environment and are outstanding examples of what makes place important in cities.
Bruner winners include a broad spectrum of participants, with most awards
geared toward design. Judges are comprised of an interdisciplinary panel,
including mayors and community leaders who know urban conditions, as well as
design professionals. Axelrod emphasized that the
Bruner Award Process is unique, and is determined by the perceptions of
selection committees who must achieve consensus on such issues as what is the nature of the project vision?
Is it sustainable? What lessons that can be learned? The Bruner Foundation is enthusiastic about
the Digital Archive as a means to improve accessibility to these examples of
outstanding urban excellence for architecture and planning students and practitioners.
Axelrod also touched on the new Bruner-sponsored Loeb
Lecture Series which will focus on Open Urban Spaces.
Robert Shibley spoke from the
vantage of his dual commitment both to place making and to teaching
architecture and planning. Rather than praise the Rudy Bruner Digital Archive
as “the answer” to precedent research, Shibley conjectured
that the Bruner Award portfolios reflected a broad range of interdisciplinary concerns,
that they should be seen as important documentation to be used as a resource for
making places for people. By studying such original documentation, students and
faculty can discover not only details and procedures of project implementation,
but also “tease out” and discover the place and particular circumstances that contribute
to the creation of such exemplary projects.
Bruner Award 2001 winner Lily Yeh,
founder and executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelpha, PA http://www.brunerloeb.org/PDFs/BLF_CHI_Section4c_Village.pdf
described the genesis and development of the Village which began in 1986 as a summer project involving
neighborhood children in building a community garden in a devastated urban
neighborhood. Yeh emphasized that the project was her
vision, which developed through an organic process in art, expression, and theater.
As a founder who required assistance from others, Yeh
collaborated with members of the community, many of whom had had drug problems
and other social difficulties, to enable them to express their shared ideas through
rehabilitation of their neighborhood. Once the garden was created, leaders
recognized the collaborative strengths of the community. Subsequently programs
in arts education, youth theater, urban gardening, housing rehabilitation, and other
community/economic development services such as daycare were developed with
community participation and additional funding.
Robert Belstein,
Executive Director of the 2003 Award-winning Red Hook Community Justice Center
(RHCJC), Red Hook, NJ http://www.brunerfoundation.org/p/2003_red_hook.html,
explained that the goal of this Center was to make the community a safer and
better place to live and at the same time improve participants’ and community
members’ perception of safety and of the justice system. Located in an
infamously troubled, isolated, low-income area of
Instead of situating the
court as the center of the building, with the judges on high, the Center acted
as a mechanism to bring the court and the community together. By providing not
only the court, but also facilities to address local problems such as drug use,
juvenile delinquency, and family dysfunction, questions at the community level
about the fairness and accountability of the justice system were addressed. Support
services on site include a drug treatment center, a training center with
preventive programs and GED classes, a daycare center, educational workshops,
and counseling. Rather than offering only a choice between jail and parole, those
coming to court are made aware there are other options and support for
achieving rehabilitation. Most importantly, said Belstein,
RHCJC seeks to allow the court to address the issues that bring people before
it on mostly relatively minor offences through rehabilitation, resulting in the
reduction of recidivism.
Statistics in Red Hook indicate
a lower crime rate: 0% murder rate in
2003. 71 % of community residents now feel positive about the justice center, and
a majority feel more safe. The